What Is Protection For Leather?
Protecting Leather, being a natural material, requires protection against everyday life.
If leather is protected with the correct products and cleaned on a regular basis you can extend the life of leather considerably and avoid a lot of major damage that can happen to leather.
Restorers have a selection of protection products that are natural, water-based materials to help with protection, to help avoid stains and wear taking place.
Leather must be cleaned a minimum of four times per year, high use leathers must be cleaned much more regularly.
Lighter coloured leathers suffer even more with staining and dye transfer as it’s more visible on the surface.
Lighter coloured leathers require a protection barrier to be applied so that any dirt or stains that are getting onto the leather actually sit on the protection layer rather than bonding to the clear coating on the leather surface.
How Pigmented Leather Is Made Up
The topcoat on pigmented leather is a microscopic coating that’s very fragile, this coating layer requires a great deal of protection to avoid it getting broken down.
On more natural leathers like aniline, crust and vegetable tanned leathers it’s essential a protection product is used. These leathers are open pore leathers and very absorbent materials, they will allow moisture to get in and once it’s got in to the leather, it’s almost impossible to get it back out again.
Applying protection creams to these leathers will help avoid stains taking place and provide enough natural chemicals to keep the leather soft and supple.
Semi Aniline is slightly different to aniline leather, it’s aniline dyed through just like a traditional aniline leather is with translucent dyes, but then to even the aniline dyes out semi anilines are given a clear coat lacquer with binder pigments added to finish off the surface coating, this provides a semi waterproof coating to the top of semi aniline leathers, giving them a super soft feel compared to pigmented leathers.
Semi aniline requires a specialist leather cleaner to care for them that’s more natural than standard pigmented leather cleaners. The specialist leather cleaner is more natural and designed just for semi aniline leathers and nappa leathers.
If you don’t have any leather cleaners never use household chemicals as these are most possible alkaline based and will cause damage to the clear coating and painted surface or the dyed finish on more natural leathers like full anilines. In this case it’s better to use a damp terry towel and just wipe over the surface until you can get a dedicated leather cleaner to clean your leather.
Many different protection products exist today for protecting leather and care of your leather and these should be used as often as possible as they provide a barrier against the elements like UV rays fading the surface as modern pigmented leathers are coated with water based paints rather than solvent based materials as they used to be, so are more susceptible to gaining damage than a solvent based material.